Monday, February 24, 2014

Connecting Home and School Experiences

I've always been a create little being.  I started when I was very young. I made paper collages with stickers, glue, and pretty much whatever I could get my hands on.  As I got a little older I started making what I called "clay figures", mostly tiny animals made of clay you could bake and harder.  People were always amaze at the intricacy of them.  The list goes on and on, but you get the idea.  When I walk into a craft store like Hobby Lobby or Micheal's I'm flooded with memories of all the things I have tried.  Through this I learned to love creation and this is what my discipline is all about.
Hopefully all the knowledge I have obtained by doing these things will help me to be a better teacher.  I can see myself resorting back to things that I had the best experiences with, but I will try to mix it up and try things that I didn't like for two reasons.  1- To give it a fair shot and hopefully change my own negative perceptions that I could have gotten from previous teachers.  2- Not all my students will be like-minded.  It is up to me to introduce things and let them form their own opinions.

Art Education

I decided to become an art teacher, because I want to make a difference in people's lives.  I can't imagine having a job where I didn't feel like I was making a difference daily.  It would all become about the pay check and I would probably drive myself crazy never wanting to go to work.  I want to inspire students the way I have been inspired by my teachers.  Going into art seems rather selfish, while art education is very selfless.  I hope to find a balance between being an artist myself and being an educator.  I feel like working on my own art will make me a better, more inspired teacher.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Realism

This is just to prove that I can do still life, though I choose not to most of the time.  It can be very satisfying to represent something accurately, but I have way more fun being more expressive and abstract.  Everything here was done at BYU Hawaii.  I had an amazing teacher. Same teacher for both painting 1 and figure drawing.

From life

From life



Ya i know this doesn't quite fall into the same category as the others.  It's more impressionistic and was actually done from a masterwork. 



Waves

Here is some stuff I did last semester.  I tend to go on tangents for awhile and then I switch.  Last semester I was inspired from heather brown, an artist I saw in Hawaii.  Her work looked like stain glass.  I started trying her style and it took in my own off direction from there.  Everything came from my own reference photos.  These are in order of when I painted them.  I started from inspiration from Heather and finished with a more Gauguin like style.








Tuesday, February 11, 2014

SCED 4200 blog 2: Affective Dimensions of Writing

No, I don't really think of myself as a writer, I never have.  I always had a hard time writing papers as a kid because I have a hard time organizing it.  I had a lot to say, just a loss of the right words and where to put them.  Pictures make sense to me.  I much prefer to express myself through a painting or a photograph than writing.  I love to paint because I can just pick up a brush and do it- no instructions, no limitations, no writing.  My hand coordinates with what my brain wants much more fluently than with writing.



I did do a little writing for fun as a child.  I wrote my own stories.  Most of them were short- if they were long I never finished them.  I also wrote faithfully in my journal for a little while.  It's the only time in my life that I've done that.  Now the format has changed, everything is digital.  I text, instagram, facebook, blog, and write for school.  Free writes are rare now-a-days unless they are correlated to school.

Sometimes I did enjoy writing in school, when there wasn't a harsh structure where I could relax and forget about grammar-things like reflections.  I like the reflections because when i have to write about something long enough, I am always surprised with the thoughts I develop.  Thoughts I don't think would have come to surface otherwise.  As mentioned in class today, writing does help us to collect our thoughts.  I also remember a particular essay that I enjoyed writing.  This being because I got to choose the artist I researched, Picasso.  Learning about this artist was very intriguing and enlightening.

Having had these experiences, I think as a teacher I will have my students write, but I won't put a lot of pressure on them to do it a certain way or in a certain format- those things were always stressful to me.  The most important thing I am looking for is brain stimulation.  I want them to write meaningful things verses the generic bs most students do just to get by.  I also know that most people like options and will try to provide options for my students.